As of the broadcast of The Interstellar Song Contest, Susan, the Doctor’s granddaughter (played by Carole Ann Ford), has been seen in on-screen Doctor Who for the first time since 1983, when she appeared (more or less to make up the numbers and trip over things), in the 20th anniversary special, The Five Doctors. 

Meanwhile, in a reality just a jump to the left and a step to the right along from the on-screen universe of Who, where the Big Finish audio adventures live and run their course, Susan has had a much busier time in recent years. 

In particular right now, she’s embroiled in a series of stories set during the last great Time War. But whereas, for instance, the circumstances of the war turned the Master extra vicious and effective, and turned the Doctor into a warrior for what he (charmingly or delusionally) believed was the first time in his life, the Time War affects Susan in the most emotionally attractive way.

She is no warrior, and nor will at least this incarnation ever be. But that doesn’t mean she can’t find a place, a way to help the Time Lords, at least in the early, less corrupted stages of the Time War. She becomes, if anything, more empathic than she used to be, more of a problem-solver, more eager to help species she encounters find a way through the quagmire of the war. 

While the Doctor abandons everything he’s ever been about and becomes the War Doctor, Susan trusts in her experience even more than ever before, becoming one of the best ambassadors and diplomats the Time Lords have at their disposal.

Previously on Susan’s War…

At the end of the second box set of Susan’s Time War adventures, that contrast between the War Doctor’s way of doing things and Susan’s was shown to be sharp and spiky, as she devoted years to finding a peaceful way through a temporal conundrum, which he then (to coin a phrase) blew the bloody doors off.

The third box set, Grandfather Time, reunites the two in a pair of longer-feeling, more technically and temporally complex adventures. The second box set leant heavily into the emotional approaches they each bring to the Time War, but this third set brings them face to face with a level of complication that essentially pulls them closer together, each making use of the other’s skills to advance to the next layer of the puzzle.

In The Last of the Kaleds, David Llewellyn – always a reliable and dextrous pair of storytelling hands – invents a Kaled diaspora that escaped from Skaro significantly before the events of Genesis of the Daleks, by which time it had become common knowledge on Skaro that there was no other life out in the vastness of space.

These Kaleds have established themselves on a planet they’ve called Kaledon, and it could be a significant strategic gift to the Time Lords. In the first place, this series’ Devious Time Lord Git Extraordinaire, Cardinal Rasmus (Damien Lynch), wants to establish it as a secret base of operations, from which the Time Lords could pop through a reality gap and launch sneak attacks on the Daleks. This, he tries to convince the Kaledons, does not amount to “getting involved” in the war.

Because clearly, he thinks they’re mostly stupid(!).

But Kaledon could also be useful to the Time Lords because the planet… has… well, it has its own not-exactly-Daleks. Imagine a planetful of the tea-serving Daleks from Victory of the Daleks and you’re in the right area. These, without the murderous intent of the full-on screaming mutant versions, he thinks could be enormously useful as spies among the Dalek ranks.

When Is A Dalek Not A Dalek?

There is of course a mystery inherent in the existence of these non-Dalek Daleks. How can the Kaledons, who left before Davros’ experiments, have evolved their own versions of the deadly dustbins?

Kaledon, it turns out, has its own “Great Scientist,” known only as “The Engineer,” and there is also an aristocratic power struggle at the top of Kaledon society – which listeners familiar with the I, Davros series will grin and nod about. Incidentally, if you’re not yet familiar with the I, Davros set, stop what you’re doing immediately and go binge that series. It’s unbelievably cool and epic.

Kaledon and its Daleks, as it turns out, have no intention of being used as Time Lord pawns against their mutated kin, but to explain much more would be to rob you of the pleasure of the story’s reveals. But there are some great War Doctor and Susan set pieces, including a huge vertical warehouse spying and escape sequence that would not be out of place in a Terry Nation story, and the reveal of who – and indeed, what – The Engineer is will give you at least a gasp akin to anything in The Interstellar Song Contest, though more by virtue of its originality than its return of a Classic era character.

We get to hear Susan negotiate her way through a complex situation in this story, even as Rasmus is trying to do additional deals over her head, various local bigwigs are aiming robotic armies at one another for the strictly localised privilege of ruling the planet, and a giant dilemma over the future of the world hangs in the balance towards the end. 

But you also get to hear Susan and the War Doctor hash out a thing or two about the way in which, similarly to the original Doctor, he treats her as an inexperienced child just because she’s his granddaughter. 

Susan, Daleks, and an Army of Robo-Nuns

Susan has grown up. She may have only had the one life so far, the one relatively linear set of life experiences, but she is in no sense the “child” she was to him when they first went adventuring. Llewellyn not only shows that in her skilled approach to diplomacy, he has it expressly, helpfully spelled out in conversations between her and the Doctor, while the two of them slide into each other’s way of working here to everybody’s benefit, including their own.

It has a bit of everything you could wish for, this story. A Kaled enclave with different Daleks. A diplomatic mission to a planet that could, if it goes wrong, potentially end the world’s existence. A local power struggle, complete with robo-nuns. A giant Dalek element that we’re not about to spoil for you. And a platform for both the War Doctor and Susan to show off what they’re best at, and somehow work their different approaches in a kind of harmony.

Epic storytelling in a pocket world that gives the Daleks an alternative to their deadly evolution? We’ll have that any day of the week and twice on Sundays, thank you very much.

Enter The Voord!

And then, just when you think you’re full to bursting point, along comes Andrew Smith and the Voord!

Andrew Smith… has a knack with the Voord. If they ever make it back to the on-screen version of Doctor Who, I’ll be starting up a petition to demand that they should only be written by Andrew Smith.

If you want a perfect Voord story that about triples everything you’ve ever understood about their culture, go check out Domain of the Voord in the Early Adventures range. In fact, even if you don’t want a perfect Voord story, go and check that out – you’re allowed to be wrong, but only so far, and Domain of the Voord will make your life better.

As indeed will The Voord Alliance, because he’s done it again, when really speaking, there’s no reason to have doubled down on the Voord. There would, at least technically, be a solid, Steven Mofat-style, temporally head-scratching story here with any additional species – it’s essentially a kind of Time Lord version of Taken, where a young, rebellious Time Lady has got herself in over her head going up against the Daleks and ends up in a temporal puzzle of what has happened, what is happening, what will happen to whom and when.

Rasmus sends the War Doctor and Susan into the breech, because the reckless Time Lady is his own daughter, and he could never get clearance to launch an official rescue mission for a single individual. So technically, the mission is: Get in, grab the girl, get out again with everybody alive and not horribly scarred by temporal fallout.

Simple. Right?

Let me introduce you once again to Andrew Smith, and to the Voord. 

Raising the Stakes

The Voord are on Sarros Minor – location of a Dalek science station and the last known location of Rasmus’ daughter – with an agenda of their own. And while “the enemy of my enemy is a friend” is a solid policy whenever you’re dealing with the Daleks, there are traps and revelations along the way that make the whole mission a lot more strategically important than any handful of lives. And the Voord, with their own drives and moral codes, make the story significantly better. The Voord, it turns out, have the capacity to radically complicate and improve an already complex situation if you put them in the hands of Andrew Smith.

Do that. Do that more often.

The storytelling structure of The Voord Alliance is such that you notice things on a first pass, but you only come to understand their full impact precisely when Smith wants you to, to drag you further towards the heart of the planet’s basketful of mysteries.

It’s an impeccable, Faberge snowglobe of a creation, and once you’re at the far end of it, it will amaze you to look back and realise you understood it, both in the moment and as a whole.

Susan and the War Doctor, while still maintaining their individual approaches here, work with less conflict when faced with bigger, more complex problems, and in this story, they arrive at a kind of détente, heightened by the ripple of similarity between Rasmus’ care of his daughter and her failure to initially appreciate it for what it is and their own potentially spiky situation.

The Future of Susan

As the War Doctor appears to find a way back to his “bit” of the Time War by the end of Smith’s temporally twisted tale, it begs the question of whether there will be any further Time War adventures for Susan. The first set was a relatively scattergun set of stories to find what worked, but the second and third sets built a real platform to show off her skills.

Without the War Doctor at her side, will the “War Susan” have any more mileage? 

Honestly, it’s absolutely possible. Carole Ann Ford knows the role upside-down and backwards, particularly when allowed to play her in this grown-up, more experienced and far more nuanced way. 

We’re holding out for the War Susan Vs the War Master, personally. Or perhaps, given their mutual dedication to the task of seeing the Time Lords through the war, perhaps even the War Susan alongside the War Master…

The third Susan box set of Time War stories delivers everything you know you want from this series – and then throws the Voord in as well, to make everything better! Tony Fyler

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